The Naked City Blog

Exploring life in the city – Charlotte – and the greater metro region. Looking at urban design, transportation, growth, the built environment and more.

Mary Newsom is a lifelong journalist and observer of city life in the Charlotte region and beyond, with a focus on urban design, sustainable development, growth and city planning. She is associate director of urban and regional affairs at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Her blog reflects her views only, not necessarily those of the institute or of UNC Charlotte.
Contact: mnewsom@uncc.edu.

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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Charlotte history, hiding behind a wall

One of the best statues I’ve ever seen sits atop Rome’s Gianicolo
Hill. A series of Busts of Important Men lines an avenue, and there is the
obligatory statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian hero of the Italian
unification movement in the 19th century.

But a short walk away is another statue. It’s Anita
Garibaldi. She is sidesaddle, atop a rearing horse, holding a small child in her
left arm, close to her breast. With her right, she aims a pistol at the sky.
What a woman!

Anita Garibaldi. Photo: "Blackcat" via Widkimedia Commons

Charlotte, in some ways being even more traditional than
Rome, does not memorialize its women with statues. Heck, it barely memorialized anyone with statues – at least, not until the Trail of History project came along, since representational statuary today is about as fashionable among artists as bustles, spats and top hats.

That’s a group of
local donors and history buffs who are working to erect a series of statues of
historic personages along the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. Their first was a
monument to Capt. James Jack, who rode from Charlotte to the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia in 1775 carrying (according to local legend) a copy of
the May 20, 1775, Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Meck Dec skeptics
say he only carried the Mecklenburg Resolves, adopted May 31, 1775.
Whatever. There’s a guy on a charging
horse, in a pool of water across Kings Drive from Central Piedmont Community
College.

Now Trail of History monument No. 2 is up, and by golly, it’s
a woman: Jane Renwick Smedberg Wilkes. Read more about her here. She was a New Yorker who married her
first cousin, John Wilkes, and moved to Charlotte in 1854. After the Civil War she
was active in founding the first two civilian hospitals in Charlotte, including
Good Samaritan, the now-demolished hospital for blacks during that segregated
era.

Jane Wilkes. Photo: Tom Hanchett

The statue, designed by Wendy M. Ross of Bethesda, Md., depicts a woman with a slight smile (and not brandishing a pistol). It's the smile of
someone who is possibly about to ask you to support a project for which she is
raising funds, and whose smile is also a bit stern, as if to show that even if
you do not give her any money, she will not rest until you – and others – make her
project a success.

While it’s excellent that our monuments are honoring one
woman among the seven people planned to have statues (see the list here), it’s a bit odd that this statue is
hiding behind a very long brick wall along Morehead Street, where it crosses
Little Sugar Creek. Why have a wall between the sidewalk and a public park
area? That seems to me inappropriately suburbanistic for this part of the city. Plus, it obscures the existence of the statue
and the nice flowers planted around it. When you are walking on the Little
Sugar Creek Greenway on the other side of the creek, you have no idea the
monument to Jane Wilkes is even there.I asked Mecklenburg County Park and
Recreation Department greenway planner Gwen Cook for details on the design of
the garden. She relates, via email: "At Robert Haywood Morrison Gardens [the formal name for the small garden in which the statue resides], the wall is
an essential element of the garden.The
noise from Morehead Street is terrible. You couldn’t hear yourself think, and if we hadn’t got that right, we’d have no garden.We had to add the wall to manage the ambience
of the garden." She said the garden, but not the statue, are on maps along the greenway.

The only way I knew the statue was there was having read about it in the Charlotte Observer. As her great-great granddaughter, Margo Fonda of Charlotte, told the Observer, “Jane
Wilkes was from a time when women didn’t vote, didn’t hold jobs and stayed in
the background, but she did incredible things. And she
was really humble about it, not even acknowledging it in her autobiography. The
idea of a statue to her is really cool.”